France

January 16, 2007

It is unacceptable to "want to live in France without respecting and loving France." So said Nicolas Sarkozy in an address to 80,000 supporters of his run for the president of the Republic as the candidate of Jacques Chirac's party. But he is not Chirac's candidate, not by a long shot. In any case, what he said should be liberating for the French, since they have had to pretend that it is perfectly alright to have 8 percent or 10 percent of the country's inhabitants live among them, get social benefits, invite relatives to come and still hate la belle France.

May 08, 2006

May 01, 2006

COVER CHARGE
Your recent editorial on universal health care skirts some key realities ("Moral Imperative," March 20 & 27). The health systems in France and Japan are very different. France has more hospital beds per capita than the United States, but many states have "certificate of need" regulations that prevent new hospitals from being built--unless newcomers can overcome incumbents' lobbying against competition. So increasing the number of hospital beds in the United States requires less government control, not more.

April 03, 2006

CATHOLIC MATTERS: CONFUSION, CONTROVERSY, AND THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH
By Richard John Neuhaus
(Basic Books, 272 pp., $25)
Liberal modernity exasperates traditional religion. It fosters a pluralism that denies any one faith the power to organize the whole of social life. It teaches that public authorities must submit to the consent of those over whom they aspire to rule, thereby undermining the legitimacy of all forms of absolutism. It employs the systematic skepticism of the scientific method to settle important questions of public policy.

February 20, 2006

SIEGFRIED SASSOON: A LIFE
By Max Egremont
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 597 pp., $27)
I.
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, do Americans know, or think they know, about Siegfried Sassoon? To judge by Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, not very much. There they will find four short and surprisingly limp passages from Sassoon’s war poetry, which give no idea of the hysterical loathing, fear, and compassion that generated them (the only one that might have done so is carefully removed from its context).

February 20, 2006

The riots currently engulfing the Islamic world, prompted by a Danish newspaper’s decision to caricature the Prophet Mohammed, require two responses. The first is easy: horror. In the physical assault on Denmark’s embassies and citizens, and in the diplomatic assault on Denmark’s government—all because a free government won’t muzzle a free press—multiculturalism has become totalitarianism. Religious sensitivity, say the zealots marching from Beirut to Jakarta, matters more than liberty. Indeed, it matters more than life itself.

February 14, 2006

Two weeks ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to refer the matter of Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council. There is plenty to like about the IAEA resolution, starting with the large majority it commanded among the organization's member states--even the usually recalcitrant Russians and Chinese signed on.

February 06, 2006

Cachè
(Hidden)
(Sony Pictures Classics
THE NEW FILM YEAR BEGAN in at least one heartening way: Daniel Auteuil arrived in a new picture. This French actor is so incredibly credible, so unostentatiously fine, that he makes his way from film to film without attracting the hoopla that attends more consciously virtuosic actors. I mention here only two of his many roles. In The Widow of Saint-Pierre, set on that French island, Auteuil was a nineteenth-century army captain whose spiritual tenor changes while he waits for the arrival of a guillotine to execute a murderer in his charge. In Apres Vous,